A very early initial draft of this review was posted on OSNews many months ago. The final version just went live and is about three times as long, now including open source alternatives, as well as a review of the new online word processor solutions.
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Member since:2007-02-22
You're not alone, buddy!
I've used WordPerfect for years. (And I'm only 21 years old; we used it in elementary, middle, and high school. We actually learned WP instead of MS Word.) Hell, I still fire up WP 5.1 DOS when I want to get some "real" work done, namely creative writing.
WP on Windows has the best automatic text kerning I've seen in a word processor (although it looks nasty on screen at first, until you get used to it). I pretty much could not use MS Word until they introduced that reveal-codes-like feature in Word XP. "Make it Fit" and "Keep Text Together" are probably my next favorite features. Sure, you can do that in other word processors, but it's a lot easier and more intuitive in WordPerfect. To me, it seems everything in WordPerfect is presented very intuitively and works exactly like you'd expect it to--but that could be because I was "raised" on WP.
I find myself reaching for the help files a lot in MS Word and OO.o, but very seldom in WordPerfect. Frankly, to me, WordPerfect's help file sucks (and the "HTML Help" in WordPerfect X3 isn't much better than the older help files), but it's not too big of a deal for me because I don't use it often.
If you don't like the interface, you can always switch to MS Word mode in the workspace manager. When I had a summer job at a big law firm, they used WordPerfect 12 (I think--it could have been 11). All of the other students that "hated" WordPerfect switched to MS Word mode and were happy campers. MS Word was no doubt what they learned in school.
My only complaints with WordPerfect're the lack of Unicode and ODF support. I keep OO.o around for when I need to work with Cyrillic, Japanese, and ODF documents. OO.o converts ODF to WPD (and vice versa) very well. I'm not all that fond of OO.o because it seems to try to mimick MS Word too much, and I use WP because I don't like MS Word.
Wow, I just typed a mini-review of WordPerfect. I didn't mean to do that--I just meant to type a reply agreeing with you.
Member since:
2007-01-18
It was nice to finally see WordPerfect compared to Office and OpenOffice.
As a WordPerfect user I always feel like the black sheep of the office users, but I still think it's better than Office or OpenOffice. However, it never fails that when people decide to compare office programs WordPerfect is always left out. I thought the review was very nice. I can't say that it's 100%, but as a WordPerfect user I thought the WordPerfect review was very good.
As for Unicode support in WordPerfect. It isn't going to happen anytime soon. According to the many reports I've read or heard it would take a complete rewrite of WordPerfect to have real Unicode support and Corel doesn't have the man power to do it. If somebody would come along and make a better WordPerfect (including Reveal Codes) I would switch, but OpenOffice definitely isn't it. I'm not trying to bash OOo as I keep it around for some features that WordPerfect doesn't have, but overall I just find it hard to use and lacking in areas I'm use to.